Fighting the Internet - Rav Matisyahu Soloman

Fighting the Internet - no holds barred & any twisting of truth is permitted!

Disclaimer: I agree that there are severe dangers of the Internet. I do, however, believe that discussion of the issue should be honest and deal with the full picture of reality. The following is an example of cherry picking to make for the worse case scenario.

Binah magazine's recent edition (page 36 Nov. 21, 2011) dedicated to convincing its readers of the evils of the Internet has a lead of story of the tragic story of a "good, clean-cut guy with an mba" who was destroyed by Internet access. However contrary to Binah’s self-serving presentation,  the story is not about a good guy destroyed. Rather it is about an Orthodox Jewish pervert who was caught by cops monitoring the chat rooms. What was his crime? 

The “clean-cut” victim of internet writes: 

Somehow, I carried on the appearance that everything was okay, until I was arrested this past January for chatting with young women who were really undercover officers posing as minors. (I never paid any attention to details since in the world of the internet, everybody makes stuff up, including me.) things began to fall apart quickly. I lost my job, and the next month I was extradited to another state where charges were filed against me… I am currently facing over 24 felony counts in two counts. I was released on $80,000 bail with a GPS monitor on my ankle. You can't imagine what suffering this is. Please help me do teshuvah. Help me warn others not to fall into this trap. The internet is like a cancer. I was a good, clean-cut guy with an MBA from one of America's best-known colleges of business. I passed my CPA on the first try. I had my choice of great jobs. It's all blown away. I'm now jobless and penniless, and we're soon expecting child number four. I can't explain what has happened, as it all seems like a blur, but I was living two lives... And what I thought was a secret life has now become an open book..”

In other words he was having sexually explicit conversations with a number of different minors. His actual lament is that he was caught because of the internet - not that the internet made him do something perverted. One does not get busted for communicating with a minor on the internet about politics or any other normal topic. He is a pervert who is being portrayed by Binah as a victim. Binah is in effect claiming that this pervert would have led a pure life of Torah & mitzos – except for the internet. This is outrageous!

An analogous story would be about a “clean-cut” Talmid Chachom who loved Torah – but he met his downfall because he became a rebbe in yeshiva and he just couldn’t control his lust for sex with children. Therefore this teaches us that we should ban yeshivos and day camps where these type of "innocent" people are tempted to sin.

Rabbi Meiselman - Kiruv: Torah & Science - Rejecting apologetics

 5tjt

There are those who argue that perhaps we should teach that the Torah is allegorical for the purposes of kiruv. Wouldn’t a non-affiliated Jew be more receptive to the Torah if he didn’t have to believe in a worldwide flood? This is not a new approach, and Rabbi Meiselman felt that this was the wrong approach.

This same argument was made in the past when Torah was confronted by a challenge from a different culture and/or discipline. Some felt that Torah is in an intellectually inferior position when confronting modern intellectual theories and discussion. Hence, these people developed a need to reinterpret Torah concepts to fit an intellectual worldview to which they accorded respect and veneration. This is being done today to accommodate modern academia.

For years, people looked the other way when kiruv workers and others expounded theories about Torah and science that were unacceptable to the world of talmidei chachamim. Some looked away because they did not want to interfere with otherwise important work. Some were not sufficiently sophisticated in the various disciplines to navigate properly and give the proper Torah response. However, this silence should not be interpreted as acquiescence or agreement to these positions. Some talmidei chachamim who had not sufficiently understood these areas and were expert elsewhere may even have consented. What changed recently is the attempt by some contemporary authors to make these accommodating theories mainstream. While in the past some have looked the other way, this can now no longer be continued. Torah can defend itself. The most potent kiruv tool is to expose the uninitiated to the depth and sweep of authentic Torah.

Syracuse fires basketball coach over sexual abuse accusations

Birth coaches (doulas) halachic differential between Chassidic & Litvishe poskim

One of the important considerations in dealing with women's concern about modesty in child birth is the question of pikuach nefesh. While everyone seems to hold that child birth is pikuach nefesh - there is no consensus on what is permitted. Rav Moshe Feinstein permits her husband to go to the hospital with her on Shabbos as well as to travel to a more distant hospital - to avoid upsetting her.

In regard to birth couches (doulas) the Chassidic poskim allow a woman to call her coach on Shabbos and for the coach to take a cab to the hospital to assist and also for the coach to wear a beeper. In other words Chassidic poskim treat birth coaches as they would members of hatzola. It would follow from this fact that the Chassidic poskim should be more willing to permit female emts for child birth than a Litvishe posek. At this point I am only providing conjecture. But it would be ironic if the Chassidic poskim are more sensitive and concerned with female concerns.

Hatzola & Chassidic women concerned for tznius

AP      SEE previous post -  http://daattorah.blogspot.com/2011/10/hatzola-protecting-women-from.html

Most Orthodox Jewish women avoid touching men except direct relatives. They don't sit next to men on buses or even at weddings. They have separate swimming hours at indoor pools. But for an emergency birth, Orthodox Jewish women will usually turn to the all-male volunteer ambulance corps known as Hatzolah.

Now a group of women in one of the country's largest Orthodox Jewish communities is proposing to join up with Hatzolah as emergency medical technicians to respond in cases of labor or gynecological emergencies.

The proposal for a women's division has stirred up criticism within Orthodox Jewish circles, with one well-known blog editorializing that it amounts to a "new radical feminist agenda." And when a prominent elected local official, Assemblyman Dov Hikind, spoke about it on his weekly radio show, he was criticized for even bringing the subject up.

Rachel Freier, a Hasidic attorney who is representing the women in the Borough Park neighborhood of Brooklyn, said there is a need for emergency services that adhere to the community's customs of modesty, calling for the sexes to avoid physical contact unless they are related.

"It has nothing to do with feminism," Freier said. "It has to do with the dignity of women and their modesty."

Loving a suicidal, psychotic spouse

New York Times

Two years ago, when Giulia and I were 27 and in our third year of marriage, she suffered a psychotic break. She had no history of mental illness preceding the abrupt arrival of delusions and paranoia. It was a bewildering decline that snowballed from typical work stress to mild depression to sleeplessness to voices speaking to her in the night. [...]

Giulia has since gotten better. She no longer takes the medicine. We don’t live in a “Yes” or “No” existence anymore. We now live with bills and iPhones and deadlines.  [....]

BUT I do miss how much we talked about life and love that year. It seemed like all we ever talked about. In one sense we have never communicated less in our relationship and never been in such different mental spaces, yet in another sense we were closer emotionally than we have ever been and more deeply connected. Her mental illness cast such a strange web of paradoxes into our life together. 

Nowadays we bicker about things like doing the dishes.[...]

For Some, Psychiatric Trouble May Start in Thyroid

New York Times

In patients with depression, anxiety and other psychiatric problems, doctors often find abnormal blood levels of thyroid hormone. Treating the problem, they have found, can lead to improvements in mood, memory and cognition. 

Now researchers are exploring a somewhat controversial link between minor, or subclinical, thyroid problems and some patients’ psychiatric difficulties. After reviewing the literature on subclinical hypothyroidism and mood, Dr. Russell Joffe, a psychiatrist at the North Shore-Long Island Jewish Health System, and colleagues recently concluded that treating the condition, which affects about 2 percent of Americans, could alleviate some patients’ psychiatric symptoms and might even prevent future cognitive decline.

Battle for Apartments in Mea Shearim between Gur & Neteurei Karta

Sikrikim member Yosef Hazan arrested in Jerusalem

Jerusalem Post

Yosef Meir Hazan, a member of the Sikrikim (Sicarii) extremist ultra-Orthodox group, was arrested this week in the capital’s Geula neighborhood as part of a special operation by the Jerusalem Police.

According to police spokesman Micky Rosenfeld, Hazan was arrested Tuesday on suspicion of causing public disturbances, damaging property and assaulting a police officer attempting to arrest him

Rabbi Berel Wein: The widening disconnect between masses & rabbinic leaders

Jerusalem Post

I think that one of the more difficult situations that exists in the Jewish world of today, especially, in my humble opinion, in the Diaspora, is the widening disconnect between the vast bulk of the population and the rabbinic leadership. While there are many rabbinic pronouncements on the minutiae of Jewish law, customs and observance there is very little that is said and heard about the major problems that face the Jewish world – the security of the Jewish state, the dire financial situation that threatens the entire system of Jewish education, the astounding rate of poverty and unemployment (voluntary and involuntary) in religious Jewish society, children at risk because of one-size-fits-all educational institutions, growing rates of divorce and family dysfunction, an unhealthy and misogynic system of dating and marriage, growing anti-Semitism and a seemingly unstoppable rate of assimilation, secularization and intermarriage that guarantees a shrinking Jewish population in a few generations.

 

Rather than address these terribly difficult issues, Jewish leadership is engaged in fighting over – again - the battles that destroyed the Jewish world of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.[...]

Abuse: Law to make everyone a mandated reporter

Value of Gratitude is finally discovered by Psychology

New York Times

...Cultivating an “attitude of gratitude” has been linked to better health, sounder sleep, less anxiety and depression, higher long-term satisfaction with life and kinder behavior toward others, including romantic partners. A new study shows that feeling grateful makes people less likely to turn aggressive when provoked, which helps explain why so many brothers-in-law survive Thanksgiving without serious injury. ...Religious individuals don’t necessarily act with more gratitude in a specific situation, but thinking about religion can cause people to feel and act more gratefully, as demonstrated in experiments by Jo-Ann Tsang and colleagues at Baylor University. Other research shows that praying can increase gratitude.

Six Day War - Miraculous or Natural? Video History

There is no question that highly intelligent planning was done by the Israelis- in terms of strategy, psychology, troop training,intelligence and weapons. But the fact that this extremely complex operation was so successful in spite of the high risk of failure - obviously places it in the realm of the miraculous. In other words it would have been totally natural for Israel to have failed. It was not inevitable that they would win. In fact a friend of mine who was there and fought in the war said the atmosphere was extremely pessimistic and the Israelis were expecting huge casualties and that their highest expectation was to avoid defeat.

Igros Moshe(Y.D. 4:8.2): Concerning the matter of the Jews who were hijacked in Uganda and then were saved by [Israeli] soldiers who went to Uganda. It is reasonable that this should be considered an open miracle. That is because in the normal course of events it would not be possible that such a thing be successful. Whatever is done in the world is only by the hand of G‑d – whether it is for the good or whether it is – G‑d forbid - ! the opposite. He causes the blow and the cure. He caused that these Jews be captured. But He also caused that they were rescued by means of giving these soldiers special courage and motivation so that they were able to save the captives. He also arranged circumstances so the soldiers in fact were successful. Nevertheless the reasons that G‑d did a miracle through sinners are hidden from us. Furthermore it is prohibited for any man to be “wise” and raise question against G‑d’s actions. Rather it is necessary for us to be innocent and accepting whatever G‑d does as it explicity says in the Torah (Devarim 18:13)